People inspect the crash site of a passenger plane near the village of Grabovo, Ukraine, Thursday, July 17, 2014. Ukraine said a passenger plane carrying 295 people was shot down Thursday as it flew over the country, and both the government and the pro-Russia separatists fighting in the region denied any responsibility for downing the plane. (AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky)

A woman reacts to news regarding a Malaysia Airlines plane that crashed in eastern Ukraine at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang, Malaysia, Friday, July 18, 2014. Ukraine said a passenger plane carrying 295 people was shot down Thursday as it flew over the country, and both the government and the pro-Russia separatists fighting in the region denied any responsibility for downing the plane. (AP Photo/Joshua Paul)

GRABOVO, Ukraine — A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 with 298 people aboard exploded, crashed and burned Thursday in a part of eastern Ukraine controlled by pro-Russia separatists, blown out of the sky at 33,000 feet by what Ukrainian and U.S. officials described as a Russian-made anti-aircraft missile.

Ukraine accused the separatists of carrying out what it called a terrorist attack.

U.S. intelligence and military officials said the plane had been destroyed by a Russian SA-series missile, based on surveillance satellite data that showed the final trajectory and impact of the missile but not its point of origin.

There were strong indications that those responsible may have errantly downed what they had thought was a military aircraft only to discover, to their shock, that they had struck a civilian airliner.

Everyone aboard was killed, their corpses littered among wreckage that was still smoldering late into the summer night.

Russian President Vladimir Putin blamed Ukraine’s government for, he said, creating the conditions for the insurgency in eastern Ukraine, where separatists have bragged about shooting down at least three Ukrainian military aircraft.

But Putin did not specifically deny that a Russian-made weapon had felled the Malaysian jetliner.

Whatever the cause, the news of the crashed plane, with a passenger manifest that spanned at least nine countries, elevated the insurgency into a new international crisis. The day before, the U.S. had slapped new sanctions on Russia for its support of the pro-Kremlin insurgency that has brought East-West relations to their lowest point in many years.

Making the crash even more of a shock, it was the second time within months that Malaysia Airlines had suffered a mass-casualty flight disaster with international intrigue — and with the same model plane, a Boeing 777-200ER.

Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia, whose government is still reeling from the unexplained disappearance of Flight 370 in March, somewhere over the Indian Ocean, said he was stupefied at the news of Flight 17, which had been bound for Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam with 283 passengers, including three infants, and 15 crew members.

Aviation officials said the aircraft had been traveling an approved and heavily trafficked route over eastern Ukraine, about 20 miles from the Russia border, when it vanished from radar screens at 2:15 p.m. local time, with no distress signal.

President Barack Obama and Putin spoke about the disaster and the broader Ukraine crisis, White House officials said, and Putin expressed his condolences to Malaysia.

But in a statement quoted by Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency, Putin said, “This tragedy would not have happened if there was peace in the country, if military operations had not resumed in the southeast of Ukraine.”

Adding to Ukrainian and Western suspicions that pro-Russia separatists were culpable, Ukraine’s intelligence agency, the State Security Service, known as the SBU, released what it said was audio from intercepted phone calls between separatist rebels and Russian military intelligence officers on Thursday. In the audio, the separatists appeared to acknowledge shooting down a civilian plane.

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry sent reporters a link to the edited audio of the calls, with English subtitles, posted on YouTube by the SBU.

According to a translation of the Russian audio by the English-language Kyiv Post, the recording begins with a separatist commander, identified as Igor Bezler, telling a Russian military intelligence official, “We have just shot down a plane.”

In another call, a man who seems to be at the scene of the crash says a group of Cossack militiamen shot down the plane. He adds that it was a passenger plane and that the debris contains no sign of military equipment. Asked if there are any weapons, he says: “Absolutely nothing. Civilian items, medical equipment, towels, toilet paper.”

Asked if there are any documents among the debris, the man says, “Yes, of one Indonesian student.”

Myroslava Petsa, a Ukrainian journalist in Kiev, said the voices in the audio sounded shocked by what they found in the wreckage.

By Thursday night, U.S. intelligence analysts were increasingly focused on a theory that rebels had used a Russian-made SA-11 surface-to-air missile system and operated on their own fire-control radar — outside the checks and balances of the national Ukrainian air-defense network — to shoot down the aircraft.

“Everything we have, and it is not much, says separatists,” a senior Pentagon official said. “That said, there’s still a lot of conjecture.”

Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, said he had called the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, to express his condolences and to invite Dutch experts to assist in the investigation.

“I would like to note that we are calling this not an incident, not a catastrophe, but a terrorist act,” Poroshenko said.

Reporters arriving at the scene near the town of Grabovo described dozens of bodies strewn about, many intact, in a field dotted with purple flowers, and remnants of the plane scattered across a road lined with fire engines and emergency vehicles.

It was unclear late Thursday whether any Americans had been aboard the flight. Russia’s Interfax news agency said there had been no Russians aboard.

In Amsterdam, a Malaysia Airlines official, Huib Gorter, said the plane had carried 154 Dutch passengers; 27 Australians; 45 Malaysians, including the crew; 12 Indonesians; nine Britons; four Germans; four Belgians; three Filipinos; and one Canadian.

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